Interesting Survey

Honzo May 1st, 2008

Late April and early May are desolate times around here.  There are finals to be prepared for, papers to write, and papers and finals to grade - not a lot of time for posting and commenting.  Today’s post won’t have a ton of substance, but should make for some fun if people have the time.  I came across the following on a facebook message board.  The postee laid outsome ground rules and then asked a series of questions.  Here is the post and my reply.

Rules:
1) No looking up in dictionary or any other source.
2) Answer must come from your own opinion.
3) If you have no idea, just guess. (it doesn’t matter)
4) Feel free to ask about some terms you don’t know.

Here’s some terms that can be discussed as to what they actual refer to:

1) What are Doctrines?
2) What does “Holy” mean?
3) Sanctify? What’s that?
4) Love is… wait…ummm…idk what love really is.
5) Predestination/Election. what’s the dif?
6) Open theism. yep.
7) Salvation…yeah, I went there.
8) Day. Oh, that’s an ez 1. or a trick Question…

My reply:

1) Doctrines - the statements of purported fact that a faith community constructions from its sacred texts.

2) Holy, as best as I can understand it, simply means “separate from.”

3) Sanctify - to make holy - to separate out

4) Love is relating to another with the full recognition of the image of God within that person.

5) A Christianized version of the free will/determinism debate. I experience life and God as if I have free will to choose or reject his offer, so I lean towards the arminian side of things.

6) Open theism is an honest attempt to deal with problems that arise out of our sacred texts and their pain-spoken descriptions of God and his reactions to events recorded in those narratives. I think this approach ultimately fails, but I won’t sever relationship or deny inclusion within my faith community because someone thinks this approach interprets what they see going on with God in the Bible.

7) Salvation - we have sinned and a a result of this is judgment by God. God has provided a way out and all we need to do is to accept his offer. (short and dirty version)

8) Day -? I am not sure what you are talking about here. Are you referring to the use of the term “day” in Genesis? If so, I have a two pronged answer. Firstly, when I survey God’s creation, boy it sure seems old. The best scientific minds (chrisitan and secular) seem to think that it is really old. This not only goes for the earth, but also the universe as well. So interpreting day as a long period of time seems to work well. Another approach is to say that It took God seven days to pronounce these things and long and overlapping periods of time for them to enact themselves. Now, leaving aside all of the ambiguities with the word for Day in the hebrew, we could look at ancient near east creation literature in comparison with the two accounts of creation in Genesis and say that maybe we are dealing with an absolutely true mythological account of God creating the earth, one that tell us the whys and hows.

A Hitchens made of Straw

Honzo December 18th, 2007

A little while ago, I posted a short bit about Hitchens’ reply to a speech that Romney, a presidential candidate who happens to be Mormon, had given. Wuzzdem had made a nice little parody of Hitchens’ reply that tickled me a bit. During the course of writing that post, I claimed that Hitchens’ had strawman’ed Romney.

Gringo contested this claim in a comment on the post, asking me to clarify how exactly how Hitchen’s strawman’ed Romney.

Notice what Hitchens’ complaint was in the bit that I quoted;1 it is the claim that God choose to reveal itself to the world via “few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater.” By doing so, he is claiming how God should be acting. It is one thing to claim divine revelation, i.e. that something has revealed how it acts; it is another to claim that you know, based on reason, that something must act a certain way. Hitchens is casting onto god, as a proof of its existence, the requirements that it act as Hitchens himself would act, i.e. choose another way to reveal itself to the world than how Christians and Mormons claim it has. This is a classic anthropomorphism, the attachment of human qualities onto non-human entities.

Hitchens’ anthropomorphism is especially ironic because Hitchens and the new atheists often criticize the “religionists”** for anthropomorphizing god. Yet, here Hitchens is doing so and uses this to discredit tenets of Romney’s faith. The question is not whether people of faith anthropomorphize god, but that Hitchens himself will only accept a god that is like him.

Having established that Hitchens is anthropomorphizing god,2 is there a strawman in his comment? I think that there is. His sarcastic attack on the claims of Romney’s faith (and the claims at hand overlap with mine here) is based on how Hitchens’ anthropomorphism, not on Romney’s claim of a revealed God. In order to avoid a strawman, Hitchens must argue from the claims that Romney’s faith makes when he is critiquing his system of thought. That is to say, one must consider the whole of a worldview, not just take potshots here and there. Romney’s faith, and mine, describe a revealed God that consistently chooses those that are powerless, those that are oppressed, to be recipients of His revelation. Therefore, it would come as no surprise to anyone that actually listens to the claims of Mormonism that God would reveal himself to “few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater.”

Because Hitchens argues against the validity of Romney’s faith on the basis of Hitchens’ idea of what god must be like instead of how instead of actually using Romney’s claims of what God is like, he argues about his opponent’s position without actually using his opponent’s position - classic strawman.

[cross posted at H/J]

  1. I am only concerning myself here and in the previous post with the bit that I quoted. Neither here nor in the original post did I claim to do a complete treatment of his reply; it was just something that came to me as I was relying the post from Wuzzdem. However, I do think that this comment is indicative of most of Hitchens’ attacks of Christianity. To put it as Stephen Prothero said, “What Hitchens gets wrong is religion itself.” [↩]
  2. Notice that any group given an “-ist” on the end, when the group does not designate itself as such, clearly demonstrates that those receiving the suffix are silly, stupid, and generally unworthy of respect. [↩]

Christians and the Other

Honzo December 16th, 2007

Question of the day (this time with an answer):

How do we, as Christians, conceptualize the Other?

How should we treat these people, both to their face and within our communities while they are not present? They think that they know how to best relate to that which is “wholly Other” - whether it be God, gods, the numinous, whatever you want to call it(s). We think we know how to as well. What do we do with such an impasse? Shall we let loose upon them the canon and be done with it? Do we assume all roads generate the same journey?

A good friend of mine and fellow author here at Theology for the Masses, JR Madill, navigated these very issues a few weeks ago in a talk on Christianity and Pluralism. Now, I don’t want to give away what he had to say, but I do want to say that I found his reply to be quite good and worthy of your consideration.

 
icon for podpress  JR Madill - Christians and the Other: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hitchens in ur Kitchens

Honzo December 9th, 2007

The sometimes funny WuzzaDem looks at Hitchens’ reply to Romney’s Mormon speech: Shocker: Christopher Hitchens Bashes Mitt Romney Speech.

According to the admittedly very contradictory scriptures of the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth warned his disciples and followers that they should expect to be ridiculed and mocked for their faith. After all, how likely was it that God had decided to reveal himself to only a few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater?

What better way to make this point than by mocking and ridiculing Christians?

I think what I like the most about this quote from Hitchens (the first part) is that he is completely anthropomorphizing God here; something the new atheists are always complaining about theists doing (and rightly so!). God must act in the ways that Hitchens thinks that God should act, or the God that others posit does not match Hitchen’s imagined God and therefore does not exist (is there a man of straw in there somewhere?).

C/P at Hundiejo.com

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